Obama's Communist Mentor

[the shadow]

By Cliff Kincaid  |  February 18, 2008


Is "coalition politics" at work in Obama's rise to power?
In his biography of Barack Obama, David Mendell writes about Obama's life as a
"secret smoker" and how he "went to great lengths to conceal the habit." But
what about Obama's secret political life? It turns out that Obama's childhood
mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was a communist.

In
his books, Obama admits attending "socialist conferences" and coming into
contact with Marxist literature. But he ridicules the charge of being a
"hard-core academic Marxist," which was made by his colorful and outspoken 2004
U.S. Senate opponent, Republican Alan Keyes.

However,
through Frank Marshall Davis, Obama had an admitted relationship with someone
who was publicly identified as a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). The
record shows that Obama was in Hawaii from 1971-1979, where,
at some point in time, he developed a close relationship, almost like a son,
with Davis, listening to his "poetry" and getting
advice on his career path. But Obama, in his book, Dreams From My Father, refers to him repeatedly as just "Frank."

The
reason is apparent: Davis was a known communist
who belonged to a party subservient to the Soviet Union. In fact, the 1951
report of the Commission on Subversive Activities to the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii identified him as a
CPUSA member. What's more, anti-communist congressional committees, including
the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), accused Davis of involvement in
several communist-front organizations. 

Trevor
Loudon,
a New Zealand-based libertarian activist, researcher and blogger, noted
evidence that "Frank" was Frank Marshall Davis in a posting in March of 2007.

Obama's
communist connection adds to mounting public concern about a candidate who has
come out of virtually nowhere, with a brief U.S. Senate legislative record, to
become the Democratic Party frontrunner for the U.S. presidency. In the
latest Real Clear Politics poll average, Obama beats Republican
John McCain by almost four percentage points.

AIM recently disclosed that Obama has
well-documented socialist connections, which help explain why he sponsored a "Global Poverty Act" designed to send
hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. foreign aid to the rest of the world,
in order to meet U.N. demands. The bill has passed the House and a Senate
committee, and awaits full Senate action.

But
the Communist Party connection through Davis is even more ominous.
Decades ago, the CPUSA had tens of thousands of members, some of them covert
agents who had penetrated the U.S. Government. It received secret subsidies
from the old Soviet
Union.

You
won't find any of this discussed in the David Mendell book, Obama: From Promise to Power. It is
typical of the superficial biographies of Obama now on the market. Secret
smoking seems to be Obama's most controversial activity. At best, Mendell and
the liberal media describe Obama as "left-leaning."

But
you will find it briefly discussed, sort of, in Obama's own book, Dreams From My Father. He writes about
"a poet named Frank," who visited them in Hawaii, read poetry, and was
full of "hard-earned knowledge" and advice. Who was Frank? Obama only says that
he had "some modest notoriety once," was "a contemporary of Richard Wright and
Langston Hughes during his years in Chicago..." but was now "pushing
eighty." He writes about "Frank and his old Black Power dashiki self" giving
him advice before he left for Occidental College in 1979 at the age of
18.

This
"Frank" is none other than Frank Marshall Davis, the black communist writer now
considered by some to be in the same category of prominence as Maya Angelou and
Alice Walker. In the summer/fall 2003 issue of African American
Review, James A. Miller of George Washington University reviews a book by John
Edgar Tidwell, a professor at the University of Kansas,
about Davis's career, and notes, "In Davis's case, his political
commitments led him to join the American Communist Party during the middle of
World War II-even though he never publicly admitted his Party membership."
Tidwell is an expert on the life and writings of Davis.

Is
it possible that Obama did not know who Davis was when he wrote his
book, Dreams From My Father, first
published in 1995? That's not plausible since Obama refers
to him as a contemporary of Richard
Wright and Langston Hughes and says he saw a book of his black poetry.

The
communists knew who "Frank" was, and they know who Obama is. In fact, one
academic who travels in communist circles understands the significance of the
Davis-Obama relationship.

Professor
Gerald Horne, a contributing editor of the Communist Party journal Political Affairs, talked about it
during a speech last March at the
reception of the Communist Party USA archives at the Tamiment Library at New York University. The remarks
are posted online under the headline, "Rethinking the History and Future of the Communist Party."

Horne,
a history professor at the University of Houston, noted that Davis, who
moved to Honolulu from Kansas in 1948 "at
the suggestion of his good friend Paul Robeson," came into contact with Barack
Obama and his family and became the young man's mentor, influencing Obama's
sense of identity and career moves. Robeson, of course, was the well-known
black actor and singer who served as a member of the CPUSA and apologist for the old Soviet Union. Davis had known Robeson from
his time in Chicago.

As Horne describes it, Davis
"befriended" a "Euro-American family" that had "migrated to Honolulu from Kansas and a young
woman from this family eventually had a child with a young student from Kenya
East Africa who goes by the name of Barack Obama, who retracing the steps of Davis eventually
decamped to Chicago."

It was in Chicago that Obama became a "community organizer" and
came into contact with more far-left political forces, including the Democratic
Socialists of America, which maintains close ties to European socialist groups
and parties through the Socialist International (SI), and two former members of
the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), William
Ayers and Carl Davidson.

The SDS laid siege
to college campuses across America in the
1960s, mostly in order to protest the Vietnam War, and spawned the terrorist
Weather Underground organization. Ayers was a member of the terrorist group and
turned himself in to authorities in 1981. He is now a college professor and
served with Obama on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago. Davidson is now a
figure in the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, an offshoot of the old
Moscow-controlled CPUSA, and helped organize the 2002 rally where Obama came
out against the Iraq War.

Both
communism and socialism trace their roots to Karl Marx, co-author of the
Communist Manifesto, who endorsed the first meeting of the Socialist
International, then called the "First International." According to Pierre
Mauroy, president of the SI from 1992-1996, "It was he [Marx] who formally
launched it, gave the inaugural address and devised its structure..."

Apparently unaware that Davis had been
publicly named as a CPUSA member, Horne said only that Davis "was
certainly in the orbit of the CP [Communist Party]-if not a member..."

In addition to Tidwell's book, Black
Moods: Collected Poems of Frank Marshall Davis, confirming Davis's Communist Party membership,
another book, The New Red
Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946, names Davis
as one of several black poets who continued to publish in CPUSA-supported publications
after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact. The author, James Edward Smethurst, associate
professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst,
says that Davis, however, would later claim that he was "deeply troubled" by
the pact.

While blacks such as Richard Wright left the CPUSA, it is not
clear if or when Davis ever left
the party.

However, Obama writes in Dreams
From My Father that he saw "Frank" only a few days before he left Hawaii for
college, and that Davis seemed just
as radical as ever. Davis called
college "An advanced degree in compromise" and warned Obama not to forget his
"people" and not to "start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity
and the American way and all that ####." Davis also
complained about foot problems, the result of "trying to force African feet
into European shoes," Obama wrote.

For his part, Horne says that Obama's giving of credit to Davis will be
important in history. "At some point in the future, a teacher will add to her
syllabus Barack's memoir and instruct her students to read it alongside Frank
Marshall Davis' equally affecting memoir, Living
the Blues and when that day comes, I'm sure a future student will not only
examine critically the Frankenstein monsters that US imperialism created in
order to subdue Communist parties but will also be moved to come to this
historic and wonderful archive in order to gain insight on what has befallen
this complex and intriguing planet on which we reside," he said.

Dr. Kathryn Takara, a
professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who also
confirms that Davis is the "Frank" in
Obama's book, did her dissertation on Davis and spent much time
with him between 1972 until he passed away in 1987.

In an analysis posted online, she
notes that Davis, who was a columnist for the Honolulu Record, brought "an
acute sense of race relations and class struggle throughout America and the world"
and that he openly discussed subjects such as American imperialism,  colonialism and exploitation. She described
him as a "socialist realist" who attacked the work of the House Un-American
Activities Committee.

Davis, in his own writings,
had said that Robeson and Harry Bridges, the head of the International Longshore and
Warehouse Union (ILWU) and a secret member of the CPUSA, had suggested
that he take a job as a columnist with the Honolulu Record "and see if I could
do something for them." The ILWU was organizing workers there and Robeson's
contacts were "passed on" to Davis, Takara writes.

Takara says that Davis "espoused freedom,
radicalism, solidarity, labor unions, due process, peace, affirmative action,
civil rights, Negro History week, and true Democracy to fight imperialism,
colonialism, and white supremacy. He urged coalition politics."

Is
"coalition politics" at work in Obama's rise to power?

Trevor
Loudon, the New Zealand-based blogger who has been analyzing the political
forces behind Obama and specializes in studying the impact of Marxist and
leftist political organizations, notes that Frank Chapman, a CPUSA supporter,
has written a letter to the party newspaper hailing the Illinois senator's
victory in the Iowa caucuses.

"Obama's
victory was more than a progressive move; it was a dialectical leap ushering in
a qualitatively new era of struggle," Chapman wrote. "Marx once compared
revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far
beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface. This
is the old revolutionary 'mole,' not only showing his traces on the surface but
also breaking through."

Let's challenge the liberal media to report on this.
Will they have the honesty and integrity to do so?


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at cliff.kincaid@aim.org

Frank Marshall Davis (December 31, 1905, Arkansas City, Kansas; July 26, 1987, Honolulu, Hawaii) was an American journalist, poet, and political and labor movement activist. In his memoir Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama wrote about "Frank", a friend of his grandfather's. "Frank" told Obama that he and Stanley (Obama's maternal grandfather) both had grown up only 50 miles apart, near Wichita, although they did not meet until Hawaii. He described the way race relations were back then, including Jim Crow, and his view that there had been little progress since then. As Obama remembered, "It made me smile, thinking back on Frank and his old Black Power, dashiki self. In some ways he was as incurable as my mother, as certain in his faith, living in the same sixties time warp that Hawaii had created."[19] Obama also remembered Frank later in life when he took a job in South Chicago as a community organizer and took some time one day to visit the areas where Frank had lived and wrote in his book, "I imagined Frank in a baggy suit and wide lapels, standing in front of the old Regal Theatre, waiting to see Duke or Ella emerge from a gig."